In the second major subsea cable outage in recent months, cable faults at the weekend affect internet communication between East Africa and South Africa, disrupting East Africa’s internet links to Europe.
Faults were reported both in the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), 45km north of Durban, and the Seacom cables, according to BizCommunity.
The faults affected a number of internet service providers in the region, including Airtel, Safaricom and MTN. Internet users in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar reported disruptions to their service.
Safaricom, based in Kenya, noted its redundancy measures meant its services were still available but that some of its users would experience a reduction in speed.
Update On The Undersea Cable Cuts pic.twitter.com/fvvqze4Hkc
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) May 13, 2024
Sprint in Uganda reported that a cable repair ship had been mobilised and it would take about one week before the cable was properly back in service.
⚠️SERVICE INTERRUPTION ⚠️
Dear valued customers,
We're facing slow speeds due to undersea cable cuts affecting East Africa and Southern Africa traffic.Our technical team has worked tirelessly to optimize business- critical applications on the network, improving performance.… pic.twitter.com/rEmNzPBNH0
— Sprint UG (@SprintUg) May 13, 2024
Business Day reported that Tanzania and the island of Mayotte off Africa’s east coast were heavily affected by the cable fault; Mozambique and Malawi were experiencing a medium impact.
West and Southern Africa experienced a similar outage in March, the BBC reported. In that incident four undersea cables were damaged in a suspected underwater landslide.
Submarine cables carry more than 90% of intercontinental data traffic.
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